NEWTON'S CORRESPONDENCE AND MANUSCRIPTS
Almost all of the known letters to and from Isaac Newton have been collected in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Seven volumes, edited by H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1959–1977. (A few letters still turn up, including, recently, a handful between Newton and Fatio exchanged long after the break in their relationship in 1693.)
Newton's manuscripts are widely scattered. For this book the most important archive is held at the National Archives, in Kew, England. Newton's holograph Mint records are in six folios, Mint 19/1–6. The depositions taken in his presence are collected in Mint 17.
Other important locations for Newton documents include Kings College, Cambridge; the Cambridge University Library; the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (home of many of Newton's theological papers); the Bodleian Library and the Burndy Library collection, now housed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. I tracked these collections bibliographically and online, and consulted the documents housed in them as needed for this book through two main off-site routes.
The first was through the work of the Newton Project, which can be found at http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1. The project has published a wide-ranging selection of Newton's original writings, adding translations as necessary. Of special value to me were the transcriptions of all of Newton's surviving early notebooks. The collection also offers a very valuable set of accounts of Newton by contemporary or nearcontemporary observers. Several of Newton's reports as Master of the Mint of significance to the conversion from a silver to a gold standard are available online at http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1701-25-mint-reports.html#masters.
Last, the Harvard University Library holds a copy of the hard-to-find Chadwyck Healy microfilm edition of Sir Isaac Newton, 1642–1727: Manuscripts and Papers, edited with a finding aid written by Peter Jones: Sir Isaac Newton: A Catalogue of Manuscripts and Papers. The edition contains photographs of the bulk of Newton's manuscript output from 1660 on. It is not quite complete, but it is the nearest thing to a comprehensive collection in existence. It is not what you would call easy to use, as the quality of the photographs varies enormously, but I found it an invaluable resource.
NEWTON'S PUBLISHED BOOKS
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by
I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Opticks. New York: Dover, 1952 (preface by I. B. Cohen, c. 1979).
The Cohen and Whitman edition of the Principia remains the definitive choice for readers of English for three reasons. The translation itself is admirably clear and transparent to Newton's argument; the design of the edition does everything it can to make this dense material as easy to follow as possible; and above all, Cohen's guide to Newton's text, a book-length work in its own right, is invaluable. Other editions have come out since, but accept no substitutes. My copy of Opticks is the one with Albert Einstein's charming, brief tribute to Newton.
BIOGRAPHIES
Brewster, Sir David. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, revised and edited by W. T. Lynn. London: Gall & Inglis, 1875.
Craig, Sir John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
Manuel, Frank. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979.
Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
At different times in the course of this project I consulted a wide range of biographies. Like most writers on Newton since 1980, I am most deeply indebted to Richard Westfall's scholarly, accessible, and comprehensive biography. Westfall is one of the giants without whom this book could not have been written. The best short introduction to Newton's life and work is James Gleick's brief life. It is beautifully written and provides a very clear account of what it was that Newton did that makes him still so important; Gleick also manages to convey the context of Newton's life and times in an extremely concise package. Frank Manuel's Portrait was the book that got me started on this project; in it he quotes Chaloner's last letter to Newton, and when I first read it, almost twenty years ago, it left a question—What on earth was Newton doing in contact with a condemned coiner?—that this book attempts to answer. Craig's Newton at the Mint is the only book-length study of that period of Newton's life; it touches on Newton's tenure as Warden only briefly, but still, it's all there was. Fara's and Hall's works are aimed more at a professional audience than the lay public; both are full of valuable insights. Brewster's massive account is as much a historical document—an illustration of Victorian priorities—as it is a currently useful account of Newton. I don't always agree with Michael White's emphases, but it was the first popular Newton biography that I'm aware of to focus on what has been of scholarly interest for some time—the connection between the long-ignored history of Newton's alchemical work and his more "respectable" interests in what we now call science.
OTHER SOURCES
Abrahamson, Daniel M. Building the Bank of England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Anderson, Michael, ed. British Population History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Anonymous. Guzman Redivivus: A Short View of the Life of Will. Chaloner. London: printed for J. Hayns, 1699.
Appleby, Joyce Oldham. "Locke, Liberalism and the Natural Law of Money." Past and Present, no. 71 (May 1976), pp. 43–69.
Axtell, James I. "Locke's Review of the Principia" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 20, no. 2 (1965), pp. 152–61.
Barter, Sarah. "The Mint." In John Charlton, ed., The Tower of London. London: HMSO, 1978.
Beattie, J. M. Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
———. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
———. "The Cabinet and the Management of Death at Tyburn after the Revolution of 1688–1689." In Lois G. Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism. Volume 2: The Wheels of Commerce. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.
Bricker, Phillip, and R.I.G. Hughes. Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
Brown, E. H. Phelps, and Sheila V. Hopkins. "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates." Economica 23, no. 92, new series (November 1956), pp. 296–314.
Byrne, Richard. The London Dungeon Book of Crime and Punishment. London: Little, Brown, 1993.
Cameron, David Kerr. London's Pleasures. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001.
Challis, C. E., ed. A New History of the Royal Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Chaloner, William. Proposals Humbly offered, for Passing an Act to prevent Clipping and counterfeiting of Mony. London, 1694.
———. "The Defects in the present Constitution of the Mint." London, 1697; British Library ascription, 1693.
Chandrasekhar, S. Newton's Principia for the Common Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Charlton, John, ed. The Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions. London: HMSO, 1978.
Childs, John. The Nine Years' War and the British Army, 1688–1697. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.
Clapham, Sir John. The Bank of England. Two volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Clarke, Desmond. Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Claydon, Tony. William III. London: Longman, 2002.
Cohen, I. Bernard, and George E. Smit, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Cohen, I. Bernard, and Richard S. Westfall, eds. Newton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Coleman, David, and John Salt. The British Population. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Cook, Alan. Edmond Halley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Cragg, Gerald R. Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Craig, Sir John. "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 (1963), pp. 136–45.
———. "Isaac Newton—Crime Investigator." Nature 182 (1958), pp. 149–52.
Cranston, Maurice. John Locke: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
DeBeer, E. S., ed. The Correspondence of John Locke. Volume 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
———. Moll Flanders. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Dickson, P.G.M. The Financial Revolution in England. Aldershot, Hampshire: Gregg Revivals, 1993.
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. Alchemical Death and Resurrection. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 1990.
———. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
———, and Margaret C. Jacob. Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.
Earle, Peter. A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650–1750. London: Methuen, 1994.
Fauvel, John, et al., eds. Let Newton Be! Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Fay, C. R., "Newton and the Gold Standard." Cambridge Historical Journal 5 no. I (1935) pp. 109–17.
Feingold, Mordechai. The Newtonian Moment. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2004.
Force, James E., and Sarah Hutton, eds. Newton and Newtonianism. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.
Gaskill, Malcolm. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Gatrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Gerhold, Dorian. "The Growth of the London Carrying Trade, 1681–1838." Economic History Review 41, no. 3, 2nd series (1988), pp. 392–410.
Giuseppi, John. The Bank of England. London: Evan Brothers, 1966.
Goldie, Mark. "Edmund Bohun and Ius Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693." Historical Journal 20, no. 3 (1977), pp. 569–86.
Golinski, Jan. British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Goodstein, David L., and Judith R. Goodstein. Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Green, Nick, ed. The Bloody Register. Volume 1. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1999.
Guerlac, Henry. Newton on the Continent. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
———. Newton: His Friends and His Foes. Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1993.
Halliday, Stephen. Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006.
Harding, Christopher, et al. Imprisonment in England and Wales. London: Croom Helm, 1985.
Harman, P. M., and Alan E. Shapiro, eds. The Investigation of Difficult Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Harrison, John. The Library of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978.
Hayward, Arthur L., ed. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927.
Heal, Felicity, and Clive Holmes. The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Herivel, John. The Background to Newton's Principia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Herrup, Cynthia B. The Common Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Heyd, Michael. "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Leyden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995.
Hopkins, Paul, and Stuart Handley. "Chaloner, William." Entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Horsefield, J. Keith. "Inflation and Deflation in 1694–1696." Economica 23, no. 91, new series (August 1956), pp. 229–43.
Horton, S. Dana. The Silver Pound. London: Macmillan, 1887.
Houghton, Thomas. Proposals for a Fund of A Hundred and Fifty Thousand Pounds per Annum. London, 1694.
Hunter, Michael, ed. Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hurl-Eamon, Jennine. "The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law Enforcement in Early-Eighteenth-Century London." Eighteenth Century Studies 38, no. 3 (2006), pp. 461–83.
Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. London: Macmillan, 1998.
Jardine, David. A reading on the use of torture in the criminal law of England before the Commonwealth. London: Baldwin and Craddock, 1837.
Jones, D. W. War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Jones, J. R. The Revolution of 1688 in England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.
Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. http://www.gutenberg.org, 10th edition, May 2003.
King-Hele, D. G., and A. R. Hall, eds. Newton's Principia and Its Legacy. London: The Royal Society, 1988.
Koyré, Alexandre. Newtonian Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Lander, J. "Burial Seasonality and Causes of Death in London, 1670–1819." Population Studies 42, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 59–83.
———. "Mortality and Metropolis: The Case of London, 1675–1825." Population Studies 41, no. 1 (March 1987), pp. 59–76.
Langbein, John H. Torture and the Law of Proof. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Laundau, Norma, ed. Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Li, Ming-hsun. The Great Recoinage of 1696 to 1699. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963.
Library of the House of Commons. "Inflation: The Value of the Pound, 1750–2002." Research Paper 02/82, 11 November 2003.
Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Verso, 2003.
Liss, David. A Conspiracy of Paper. New York: Random House, 2000.
Locke, John. The Works of John Locke. Ten volumes. Darmstadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1963.
Lodge, Sir Richard. The Political History of England. London: Longmans Green, 1923.
Luttrell, Narcissus. A Brief History of State Affairs. Six volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857.
Macaulay, Lord. The History of England. Six volumes. Edited by Charles Harding Firth. New York: AMS Press, 1968.
Macfarlane, Alan. Justice and the Mare's Ale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Petersfield, Hampshire: Harriman House, 2003.
Mackenzie, A. D. The Bank of England Note. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.
Mayhew, Nicholas. Sterling: The History of a Currency. New York: John Wiley, 1999.
McGuire, J. E., and P. M. Rattansi. "Newton and the Pipes of Pan." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966), pp. 108–48.
McGuire, J. E., and Martin Tamny. Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton's Trinity Notebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
McKay, Derek, and H. M. Scott. The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1714. London: Longman Group, 1983.
McKie, D., and G. R. de Beer. "Newton's Apple." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 9, no. 1 (October 1951), pp. 46–54, and no. 2 (May 1952) pp. 333–35.
McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1989.
McMullan, John L. The Canting Crew: London's Criminal Underworld, 1550–1700. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984.
More, Louis Trenchard. The Life and Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944.
Murphy, Anne L. "Lotteries in the 1690s: Investment or Gamble?" Financial History Review 12, no. 2 (2006), pp. 227–46.
Murphy, Theresa. The Old Bailey. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999.
Neale, Thomas. A Profitable Adventure to the Fortunate. London: F. Collins in the Old-Bailey, 1694.
———. "Fourteen Hundred Thousand Pound, made into One Hundred and Forty Thousand Bills of Ten Pounds apiece, to be given out for so much as Occasion requires, and to be paid as Chance shall Determine in course, out of 1515000 l. being left to be only made use of to pay Interest, Premium and Charge." 1697. Location: British Library.
Nelson, Sarah Jones. Unpublished essay on Newton, Locke, and the axiomatic foundations of natural rights. Private communication, 2004.
Newman, William R. Atoms and Alchemy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
———, and Lawrence Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Newton, Humphrey. Keynes Ms. 135 (two letters from Humphrey Newton to John Conduitt, 17 January 1727/8 and 14 February 1727/8). Cambridge: King's College, Cambridge University.
Palter, Robert, ed. The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666–1696. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970.
Parkhurst, Tho[mas]. The True Way of Taxing shewing What is the Legal Rack-Rentfor Taxing first of Laymen, secondly of Churchmens Real Estates Equally. London, 1693.
Parry, L. A. The History of Torture in England. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1975.
Pepys, Samuel. The Shorter Pepys: Selected and Edited by Robert Latham. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Phelps Brown, E. H., and Sheila V. Hopkins. "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates." Economica 23, no. 92, new series (November 1956), pp. 296–314.
Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
———. London: A Social History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Richardson, John. The Annals of London. London: Cassell, 2000.
———. London and Its People. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1995.
Ruding, Rogers. Annals of the Coinage of Britain and its Dependencies, 3rd edition. Three volumes. London: John Hearne, 1840.
Saw, Reginald. The Bank of England, 1694–1944. London: George G. Harrap, 1944.
Schaffer, Simon. "Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade." In Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. Edited by Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum. London: Routledge, 2002.
———. "Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematical Lecture delivered in several locations, text, private communication with the author, 2007.
———. "Newtonian Angels." Draft book chapter, private communication with the author, 2008.
Scheurer, P. B., and G. Debrock, eds. Newton's Scientific and Philosophical Legacy. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988.
Schubert, H. R. History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450B.C. to A.D. 1775. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.
Schwoerer, Lois G., ed. The Revolution of 1688–1689. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
———, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Shirras, G. Findlay, and J. H. (Sir John) Craig. "Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency." Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219 (June–September 1945), pp. 217–41.
Shoemaker, Robert B. Prosecution and Punishment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Spence, Joseph. Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men. Edited by Samuel S. Singer. London, 1820.
Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. Edited with critical apparatus by Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones. St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958.
Stone, Lawrence, ed. An Imperial State at War. London: Routledge, 1994.
Sullivan, Robert E. John Toland and the Deist Controversy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Thayer, H. S., ed. Newton's Philosophy of Nature. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1953.
Tobias, J. J. Crime and Police in England, 1700–1900. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979.
Wales, Tim. "Lovell, Sir Salathiel," in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Waller, Maureen. 1700: Scenes from London Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000.
Wennerlind, Carl. "The Death Penalty as Monetary Policy: The Practice and Punishment of Monetary Crime, 1690–1830." History of Political Economy 36 no. 1 (2004), pp. 131–61.
———. Isaac Newton's Index Chemicus." Ambix 22 (1975), pp. 174–85.
———. "Newton's Marvelous Years of Discovery and Their Aftermath: Myth versus Manuscript." Isis 71, no. 1 (March 1980), pp. 109–21.
Whiteside, D. T. "The Prehistory of the Principia." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 45, no. 1 (January 1991), pp. 11–61.
Whitfield, Peter. London: A Life in Maps. London: British Library, 2006.
Woolf, Harry, ed. The Analytic Spirit. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.